Tuesday, August 5, 2014

81) Golden Whistler

Pachycephala
pectoralis

Two or three summers ago while
visiting my family in Canberra I was walking through the suburb of Narrabundah,
at whose eponymous college I’d spent the last two years of high-school, when a
piping, piercing song caught my attention.I knew what it was immediately, I’d heard it often enough before – but
even so I didn’t believe my ears at first: even in Canberra, the “bush capital”, it seemed too
urban a setting for such a forest-loving bird.Yet there it was, in the top of a small eucalypt planted as a street
tree: a male Golden Whistler, as cheerfully bright a songbird as exists,
singing his song against the wide blue Australian sky.

Like many birds the Golden
Whistler shows a strong sexual dimorphism: the females are unremarkable, their
plumage various shades of brown; but the males are as colourful as their name
suggests.With yellow torso, olive-green
wings, white cheeks and black hood and throat-ring they look remarkably like
the Great Tits (Parus
major) of the Northern Hemisphere – but they’re considerably larger,
and seem somehow neater and cleaner and more pleasing in their colouration:
bespoke plumage, to the Great Tit’s off-the-rack attire.They’re common throughout the forests of
south-eastern Australia
– but never so common that seeing them can be taken for granted, and happening
upon them is always a pleasure.

I wouldn’t normally have been
walking through Narrabundah but it was a nice day and I was on my way from
Manuka to Fyshwick, where my mother and brother had recently opened a small
patisserie. My brother had abandoned an unloved
engineering degree to become a pastry chef, and my mother was supposed to have
retired – but retirement isn’t what it used to be.“The best laid schemes…” On my walk I’d
passed Narrabundah College, where I’d almost become one of the first students
to complete a combined major-minor in biology – before bad grades, the fallout
of unremarkable teenage rebellion and angst, had forced me to drop the subject
at the death and by doing so game the system, boosting my Tertiary Entrance
Rank to 61.4.I needed 60 to be eligible
to study science at the Australian
National University.I scraped in.

I stuck the science degree out,
graduated, even managed an honours degree of sorts from the Department of
Botany and Zoology – BoZo, as it was known – but I wasn’t even half way through
my degree before I realised that I’d never make it as a scientist.It turns out that a childhood of absorbing
every David Attenborough documentary the Australian Broadcasting Authority
screened wasn’t enough to make a biologist: you needed a head for numbers,
too.I’ve never had that – words are my
thing, but you can’t write your way out of a statistical analysis of genetic
diversity within a given cohort of animals.

But that’s another blog post for
another time.Back to Golden Whistlers,
because I stray too often on this blog and I’m haunted by a sense of disrespect
towards the animals I used for my own imaginings.In the second or third years of my degree I
volunteered to help one of BoZo’s PhD students trap birds in the Australian
National Botanic Gardens, just over the road from the department.I rode through icy Canberra
mornings along the lake from my parents’ house, twenty minutes from Yarralumla
to the university; I passed lively European Hares (Lepus europaeus) at Lennox Gardens,
marvelled as those shy animals scattered from my bike in such numbers as I’d
never seen before.Arriving at the
university at dawn I’d get in the student’s van and we’d drive the deparment’s
nets over to the Gardens, and there we’d set them up: mist nets, named because
they’re as fine as vapour; once they’re up you can only really spot them by the
poles that hold them vertical – or, after a few minutes, by the birds that hang
suspended in their soft embrace.You
have to remember where you’ve strung the nets, and check each one no less frequently
than every twenty minutes, because other birds – Laughing Kookaburras (Dacelo novaeguineae),
for instance – will take the opportunity to pluck the helpless birds from the
net and eat them.

You get a lot of by-catch with
mist-netting, and most of the work is in releasing the unwanted species.We were netting for Speckled Warblers (Pyrrholaemus sagittatus)
but we caught anything that happened to be flying where we’d strung the
nets.One time we caught a Common
Bronzewing (Phaps
chalcoptera), and as it flapped to free itself from the net the
pigeon released great clouds of downy feathers.It was low to the ground, at the bottom of the net: any lower and it
would’ve gone right under.

And one time we caught a Golden
Whistler.A male, bright as can be.I could hold him in my hand – his head
between my index and middle fingers, his legs between my ring and little
fingers, his wings cupped in my palm, that’s how I the PhD student showed me to
do it – and when I held him his feathers were softer than anything I’d ever touched,
and the mass of his body was almost nothing.We don’t realise how light birds are: a Superb Fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus) weighs
only around ten grams; a Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) only a
few kilograms.

But the Golden Whistler didn’t
want to be held.He was scared or he was
fed up or likely he was both and as I extracted him from the net he turned his
head in my grasp and gave me a resounding bite.He clamped his short black beak firmly on the fleshy part of my finger
and applied all the pressure he could.What a privilege, to be bitten by a wild bird!I probably exclaimed, in surprise as much as
in pain, and I finished untangling him and set him on his way.The impression of his beak upon my finger
lingered for a while.

That’s all there is, just a
distant memory of being bitten by a songbird.That’s all I’m really writing about here.I barely even remember how it felt now; I
remember only the fact of it having happened, once.What I wouldn’t give to have been older, and
more aware of the fleetingness of each instant of life, and to have felt the
moment just a little more keenly, to have been bitten more to my core.But things don’t go to plan, I guess, least
of all in hindsight.Still, every time I
see a Golden Whistler singing from his perch I can content myself with the
thought: once, just once, we were joined – in enmity, true, but joined.